With their meager payouts the top American book prizes are notoriously underfunded by most international standards: the (American) National Book Awards and Pulitzer Prizes each offer only $10,000 while the Man Booker Prize pays out £50,000, the Nigeria Prize for Literature US $100,000, the Premio Planeta €601,000 (hell, the runner-up gets €150,250 ...), etc.
Among the few other prizes that can get by on reputation and name alone is the French prix Goncourt, just awarded this year, to Au revoir là-haut, by Pierre Lemaitre (see my mention). That prize is worth all of €10; here's a picture of Lemaitre's check:
![Goncourt prize-winnings, 2013]()
With the Goncourt, the real money is in the additional sales -- and as Mohammed Aissaoui reports in Le Figaro, the original 30,000 first printing for the Lemaitre was already up to 100,000, and they're now going back and printing 220-250,000 additional copies.
It should pay off: check out the chart of the sales increases attributable to last year's prize-wins (in what was an off-year for the Goncourt, with the Joël Dicker (coming in English next year ...) the big winner):
![French literary prize sales boosts, 2012]()
Among the few other prizes that can get by on reputation and name alone is the French prix Goncourt, just awarded this year, to Au revoir là-haut, by Pierre Lemaitre (see my mention). That prize is worth all of €10; here's a picture of Lemaitre's check:
With the Goncourt, the real money is in the additional sales -- and as Mohammed Aissaoui reports in Le Figaro, the original 30,000 first printing for the Lemaitre was already up to 100,000, and they're now going back and printing 220-250,000 additional copies.
It should pay off: check out the chart of the sales increases attributable to last year's prize-wins (in what was an off-year for the Goncourt, with the Joël Dicker (coming in English next year ...) the big winner):
